Jon Lester explains not going to highest bidder, John Henry hug

Appearing Friday morning on “The Hill-Man Morning Show” on WAAF, former Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester explained the thought process behind his recent comments to the Boston Herald regarding not necessarily taking the highest offer as a free agent in the upcoming offseason.

“The whole point behind that was ‘¦ The question behind it was, ‘Hey, are you going to be basically wooed by the highest bidder?’ My point behind that is that I don’t need to go to the highest bidder if that isn’t going to make me happy,” he said. “I’m not going to just take the highest bid, the money, the most years just because it’s in front of you. To me, that’s not how I make decisions. I make decisions based on me and my family and is this place ‘whether it’s Boston or one of the other 29 teams ‘ is this place going to be good for me and my family? If that’s the case, you leave money on the table for that decision. That being said, it may be the highest bidder you end up going to. But for me you make the informed decision of, ‘Hey, is this place going to make me happy? Is this the right situation for me?’ And then you just go from there. If it’s the most years and the most money than that’s what it is.”

Some other topics discussed by Lester …

Any hard feelings with Red Sox?

“I understood where the starting point was. It wasn’t like they offered that and things stopped. The offer was closer to end of spring training so we had a little bit of time to negotiate, we used that time to the best of our ability and just couldn’t come up with a deal from there. No, there’s no animosity. There’s no hatred or anything like that. Those guys didn’t get to own the Boston Red Sox by being stupid and just starting at a point where you kind of laugh at them as far as too high or too low. They know what they’re doing and that’s how they wanted to start negotiations. But there are no hard feelings behind that.”

On comments made by Red Sox that they were going to make aggressive offer

“You can only hope at this point what they say is true, and that they want to be competitive and they want to make an offer and they want me back.”

On the hug with Red Sox principal owner John Henry upon leaving Fenway Park

“A little awkward. It was a weird gig. I was pulling out of the lot, had the truck in drive, went to move and he was just standing next to my car. I didn’t know where he came from, didn’t see him walk up. He kind of surprised me. So I get out of the truck and I thought he was just coming to shake my hand, and give me a hug and say goodbye. I kind of went in for the hug before he wanted the hug. He pulled me aside. He wanted to talk to me, which I thought was very nice. I appreciate everything he told me. Behind close doors, where there were no photographs or bystanders, we actually shook hands and had kind of a normal hug. But at that time, yeah, it was a little awkward.”